The Tripwire
by
D. van Oort & J.F.A. Davidson
From The Resister
"How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things
have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to
make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive?"--
Alexander Solzhenitzyn, Gulag Archipelago
What would be the tripwire resulting in open rebellion? Examining
the Bill of Rights, and considering EXISTING laws only, and not failed
attempts, you will find that every clause has been violated to one
degree or another.
Documenting those violations would fill volumes, and it is important
to remember that only government can violate the exercise of
unalienable individual rights and claim immunity from retribution. We
omit martial law or public suspension of the Constitution as a tripwire.
The overnight installation of dictatorship obviously would qualify as
"the tripwire," but is not likely to occur. What has occurred, what is
occurring, is the implementation of every aspect of such dictatorship
without an overt declaration. The Constitution is being killed by
attrition. The Communist Manifesto is being installed by accretion. Any
suggestion that martial law is the tripwire leads us to the question:
what aspect of martial law justifies the first shot?
For much the same reason, we will leave out mass executions of the
Waco variety. For one thing, they are composite abuses of numerous
individual rights. Yet, among those abuses, the real tripwire may exist.
For another, those events are shrouded in a fog of obfuscation and
outright lies. Any rebellion must be based on extremely hard and known
facts. Similarly, no rebellion will succeed if its fundamental reasons
for occurring are not explicitly identified. Those reasons cannot be
explicitly identified if, in place of their identification, we simply
point to a composite such as Waco and say, "See, that's why; figure it
out." Any suggestion that more Wacos, in and of themselves, would be the
tripwire, simply leads us back again to the question: what aspect of
them justifies rebellion?
For the same reasons, we leave out a detailed account of Ayn Rand's
identification of the four essential characteristics of tyranny. She
identified them quite correctly, but together they are just another
composite from which we must choose precipitating causes. These
characteristics are: one-party rule, executions without trial for
political offenses, expropriation or nationalisation of private
property, and "above all," censorship.
With regard to the first characteristic of tyranny, what is the real
difference between the Fabian socialist Republican Party and the
overtly [Bolshevik] socialist Democratic Party? Nothing but time.
Regarding the second we have the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team and the ATF's
enforcement branch. In action they simply avoid the embarrassment of a
trial. Regarding the third, we have asset forfeiture "laws," the IRS,
the EPA, the FCC, the FDA, the Federal Reserve, the Justice Department's
Antitrust Division, and a myriad of other executive branch agencies,
departments, and commissions whose sole function is to regulate business
and the economy. Regulating business for the common good (fascism) is
no different in principle than outright nationalisation (communism).
However, the fourth characteristic of tyranny, censorship, is the
obvious primary tripwire. When ideology and the reporting of facts and
how-to instructions are forbidden, there is nothing remaining but to
fight. Freedom of speech and persuasion -- the freedom to attempt to
rationally convince willing listeners -- is so fundamental an individual
right that without it no other rights, not even the existence of
rights, can be enforced, claimed, debated, or even queried.
Does this censorship include the regulation of the "public" airwaves
by the FCC, as in the censorship which prohibits tobacco companies from
advertising -- in their own defense -- on the same medium which is
commanded by government decree to carry "public service" propaganda
against them? Does it include federal compulsion of broadcasters to air
politically-correct twaddle for "The Children"? Does it include the
Orwellian "Communications Decency Act"? Does it include any
irrationalist "sexual harassment" or tribalist "hate speech" laws which
prohibit certain spoken words among co-workers? The answer:
unequivocally yes.
Although the above do not pertain to ideological or political
speech, yet they are censorship and are designed to intimidate people
into the acceptance of de facto censorship. We say that any abrogation
of free speech, and any form of censorship, which cannot be rectified by
the soap box, the ballot box, or the jury box, must be rectified by the
cartridge box -- or lost forever.
Americans have been stumbling over tripwires justifying overt
resistance for well over 130 years. On one hand, we submit that gun
confiscation is a secondary tripwire only. It is second to censorship
because if speech is illegal we cannot even discuss the repeal of gun
control, or any other population controls. If only guns are illegal, we
may still convince people to repeal those laws. On the other hand, gun
confiscation may be a sufficient tripwire because the primary one,
censorship, can be fully implemented only after the citizenry has been
disarmed.
Resistance, in the context of this article, means those legitimate
acts by individuals which compel government to restrict its activities
and authority to those powers delegated to the Congress by the people in
the Constitution.
The distinction to be drawn here is that the objective of patriotic
resistance is to restore original Constitutional government, not change
the form of government. To this end we believe: The enforcement of any
laws -- local, state, or federal -- that through the action or inaction
of the courts makes nugatory the individual means of resisting tyranny,
justifies resistance.
The operative terms of the above statement are the parameters that
must be defined and understood if resistance to tyranny and despotism is
to be honourable, and for the cause of individual liberty, rather than
anarchy resulting from a new gang of tyrants. Rebellion can never be
justified so long as objective means of redress are available, which are
themselves not subverted or rendered impotent by further or parallel
subjective legislation.
The goal of patriots throughout the country must be the restoration
of objective constitutional law and order. The failure to enforce a
subjective law (i.e. the Communications Decency Act) does not justify
that law existing, but it also does not justify resistance. This is
because non-enforcement leaves avenues of redress, including the
forbidden activity itself, still available. Should a lower court uphold
or ignore a case that challenges subjective law, peaceable means of
redress are still open by higher or lateral courts in another
jurisdiction.
However, should the U.S. Supreme Court uphold subjective laws, or
refuse to hear the cases challenging them, then the legislative,
executive, and judicial branches have all failed to guarantee individual
liberty, from the widest principles to the smallest details. A single
refusal by the highest court in the land to overturn a whim-based
subjective law, or to refuse to hear the case, is sufficient to justify
resistance to that law because there is simply nowhere left to turn for
further attempts at redress. At such time nobody is morally bound by
that law. Tyranny gets one chance per branch.
America is either a
constitutional republic or it is not. If we can restore our republic it
will ultimately occur through reason, and reason will then lead our
representatives to make unconstitutional those laws which, by any
objective standard of justice, should have never been considered in the
first place. However, we cannot assert our claim to restore our liberty
if we but accede to a single socialist construct. Freedom and serfdom
cannot coexist. We cannot have it both ways.
Life, and the means to preserve it, cannot coexist with disarmament.
Liberty, and its rational exercise, cannot coexist with subjective
constraints. Property, and its acquisition, use, and disposal cannot
coexist with expropriation. The federal government's first task is to
obey the Constitution. It has refused. Our first task as free men is to
force the government to obey it again. The Constitution of the United
States of America is a constraint on the federal government, not on the
individual.
Likewise, the constitutions of the various states are
constraints on the state governments, not on the individual. The
Constitution contains many provisions allowing the violation of our
natural rights as free men by immoral and unethical men in government.
The true heroes of the ratification debates were the Anti-federalists,
who secured Federalist guarantees that the Bill of Rights would amend
the Constitution.
To their undying credit, the Federalists lived up to their promise.
Nevertheless, only after constitutional limitations on government have
been restored in their original form can we consider amending the
Constitution to redress its very few remaining defects (for example, the
absence of a separation of state and the economy clause).
Laws that make nugatory the means of resisting tyranny and despotism
determine the tripwire. The creeping legislative erosion of the 2nd
Amendment is not the only tripwire that justifies resistance. We submit
that any gun control is a secondary tripwire. Not only because it can be
effortlessly evaded, but also because it strengthens our cause. It is
second only to censorship. If speech is illegal we can discuss neither
repeal of gun control, or the repeal of any other unconstitutional
"law."
Censorship is not a tripwire, it is THE tripwire. Thus, by default, censorship morally justifies rebellion.
Under censorship, no other rights, including the right to be free
from censorship, can be advocated, discussed, or queried. It is
incorrect to say that after censorship comes utter subjugation.
Censorship is utter subjugation. There is no greater usurpation of
liberty while remaining alive. After censorship come the death camps,
and they are not a prerequisite of censorship, they are merely a symptom
of it. Censorship qua censorship is sufficient in itself to justify
open rebellion against any government that legislates, enforces, or
upholds it.
However, that is not the half of it. Censorship is alone in being
the only violation of individual rights that does not require actual
enforcement or challenges in court, before rebellion is justified. When
the government forbids you to speak or write, or use your own or a
supporter's property to address willing listeners or readers, that
government has openly and forcibly declared that the art of peaceful
persuasion is dead and will not be tolerated. Upon that very instant,
all peaceful avenues of redress have been closed and the only possible
method of regaining that liberty is force. Whenever we give up that
force, we are not only ruined, we deserve to be ruined.
Censorship is already being "legally" imposed through accretion by
compromisers, appeasers, and pragmatists within government at all
levels. Note the demands by "progressive" organisations and
self-appointed "civil rights" groups to ban so-called "hate" speech
(they mean thought and debate), or "extreme" language (they mean
principled dissent), or "paramilitary" books (they mean the knowledge of
how to resist). When our government imposes censorship, it will be
because our ability to use force to resist censorship no longer exists.
Buying copies of The Resister is not yet prohibited; buying machine guns
already is. Unwarranted search for unlicensed books has not yet
occurred; unwarranted search for unlicensed weapons has already begun.
As your unalienable right of peaceable discussion and dissent is being
daily abridged, your right to peaceably assemble and associate in
advocacy of your own self-defence, according to your own free will, has
already been outlawed (courtesy of ADL's "model" anti-militia
legislation).
Unconstitutional federal agencies now arm themselves with weapons
that you may not own, and train in tactics that you are prohibited from
mastering. Before a government is sure you won't resist, it will make
sure you can't resist.
The most irrational, contradictory, short-range, whimsical notion
possible to men who claim the unalienable right to resist tyrannical
government is the notion that they must first let their ability to
resist be stripped from them before they have the right to use it. This
is the argument of so-called conservatives who pish-tosh the notion of
legislative "slippery-slopes," and sycophantic adherents of a supreme
Court that has no constitutionally delegated authority to interpret the
Constitution in the first place. We reject the notion of mindless
compliance with subjective "laws." Subjective laws must be resisted on
metaphysical and epistemological principles, moral and ethical grounds,
and on constitutional and historical precedence.
No rational man desires ends without means. No rational man can be
faced with his own imminent subjugation and truly believe that, once
things are as bad as they can get, "sometime" "someone" will do
"something" "somehow" to counteract that trend. Any man who counsels
another to appeal to those mystical equivalents of "divine intervention"
for "deliverance" from tyranny is our enemy by all principles
conceivable within the scope of rational human intelligence.
The time to organise resistance is not after censorship, but before
it. The time to prepare resistance is when our ability to resist is
being threatened. The time to begin resistance is when that threat has
been upheld or ignored by the courts. The unalienable rights that
safeguard our ability to resist are limited to those which, if not
violated, allow us to plan and use all materials necessary for
resistance. We submit that only the following meet that criteria:
freedom of speech and of the press, and the right to peaceably
assemble--so that we may advocate ideas, report and discuss news, and
instruct others how to carry out resistance activities (1st Amendment);
the right to keep and bear arms -- so that we may have appropriate force
in our hands should we need it, and be trained to use such force as
necessary (2nd Amendment); the right to be let alone -- so that we may
be free of government intrusion in our lives, liberty, and property (3rd
Amendment)); the right to be secure in our persons, dwellings, papers,
and property from unwarranted, unaffirmed searches and seizures -- so
that our records, ideological materials, and weapons will remain in our
hands (4th Amendment).
For the purpose of this discussion, we believe that no other rights
are relevant because if every individual right other than those four
were violated -- although it would be an unspeakably evil act on the
part of the government, justifying immediate and unforgiving resistance
-- their abridgement would not effect our ability to resist. If any of
the first four amendments are infringed by legislation, enforced by
executive power, and their abrogation is upheld or ignored by the
courts, unremitting, forcible resistance, and aid and comfort to its
citizen-soldiers, is a moral imperative for every single person who
believes that life, liberty, and property are unalienable and
self-existing, and not grants of government privilege.
"The United States should get rid of its militias." -- Josef Stalin, 1933
"The foundation of a free government begins to be undermined when
freedom of speech on political subjects is restrained; it is destroyed
when freedom of speech is wholly denied." -- William Rawle, LL.D.
Philadelphia, 1825
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ...
disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit
crimes ... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for
the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent
homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence
than an armed man." -- Thomas Jefferson (1764) -- Quoting 18th Century
criminologist Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment
